315 Balfour Brown on July 30th in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, the only daughter of four children, to Robert Balfour Brown, the son of a prosperous sea captain, and his wife, Hannah Curtis Jenkins Brown.1 After learning the rudiments of drawing and composition under her artist-father the attractive and talented Roberta studied voice and piano at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She married Johannes Alfred Franz Abloescher, an Austrian expatriate and a minor scion of Hapsburg nobility, on September 19, 1894. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 2, 1896.2 By 1898 she had separated from her husband, moved back to Nova Scotia and was granted a formal decree of divorce on November 8, 1900.3 According to the 1901 Canadian Census, she resided in the Yarmouth home her brother, William.4 However, that same year, when she received a U.S. Passport for herself and her six-year-old son, Julius Franz Abloescher, to travel in Europe, she declared her official residence as Boston. On the passport application she listed her occupation as “artist” and her height as five feet four inches; she was distinguished by a small “oval face” with brown eyes and hair.5 She pursued her art studies in Paris and London. By 1903 Roberta Balfour had moved to Colorado where she was a writer as well as the art and drama critic for the Denver Times.6 She also worked for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.7 According to the U.S. Census of 1910, she resided with her son in Denver at 1743 Humboldt Street and worked as an “insurance agent.”8 By 1913 she had married Carl Thudichum and had given birth to a daughter, Carola. The couple lived in southern California where she served as director of the San Diego Press Women’s Club for several years.9 In 1915 she studied painting under the “distinguished poet, dramatist and color scientist,” Beatrice Irwin, who was visiting from London.10 The Thudichums eventually moved to Sebastopol, California. Roberta continued to paint and worked as a feature writer for popular magazines. Her husband, who was a distinguished German-born doctor with a specialty in embryology and materia medica, was an alumnus of the Southern Homeopathic Medical College. Both became converts to the Baha’i faith. From the U.S. Census of 1920 we learn that they resided in Sebastopol on High Street with their daughter. Julius lived nearby with Roberta’s brother, William.11 In January of 1920 the Carmel Pine Cone reported that Roberta had arrived in the seaside hamlet for a stay of “several months” to prepare articles on the Forest Theatre and the local art community “for a New York magazine.”12 By April she had moved from Reardon cottage into Norwood cottage where she was receiving an ever growing circle of Carmel friends.13 In the Baha’i archives there is correspondence from 1919 through 1920 between Roberta Balfour Thudichum and Shogie Rabbani on a variety of topics, including the attainment of enlightenment and the negative consequences of World War I. Soon after her arrival in Carmel Balfour organized an “informal” group of Baha’i devotees:14 . During the past four months the cottage they occupied has been the center of many interesting Baha’i meetings, where cosmopolitan visitors and residents already drawn to the cause of Universal Brotherhood and Peace learned the latest news from the Holy Land. A significant event was the receipt of a beautiful tablet and letter from Abdul Baha, the head of the movement, from Mount Carmel, Palestine, written at Eastertide, sending greetings and blessings to Carmel and the friends here. It is the first tablet to come to Carmel since 1909, . In September of 1920 Dr. Carl Thudichum briefly opened a Carmel office “for consultation” as a “specialist in electronic diagnosis and autohemic therapy;” he continued to maintain his primary residence in Sebastopol until he moved to Los Angeles in 1922 to specialize “in the Abrams electronic system of healing.”15 In late 1920 Roberta and her daughter established their permanent residence in Carmel; her husband visited on holidays.16 By the mid 1920s Dr. Thudichum had moved his practice from Los Angeles to San Diego and his visits to Carmel became infrequent. During Christmas of 1924 Roberta celebrated the arrival of her husband and son, now known as “Julius Balfour,” with several well-attended parties that were reported on the front page of the Carmel Pine Cone.17 At this time her son was the chief engineer of the Hetch Hetchy dam project in Tuolumne County. Through the 1920s and into the mid 1930s Roberta consistently enrolled herself as a “Republican” on the Carmel voter index, but changed the title of her profession from “writer” to “artist” in 1926.18 Balfour was actively involved in the Carmel community. In October of 1921 she was elected president of Carmel’s St. Anne’s Guild and one of her close friends, Mrs. William C. Watts, was elected vice president.19 The latter’s husband was Roberta’s last painting instructor and had a profound influence on the final development of her “radical” style in painting. On one occasion she attended a town meeting at Carmel City Hall and spoke on the issue of new drainage districts.20 Balfour was a popular figure in Carmel society and frequently used her studio-home at Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Street to stage exhibitions of foreign and local artists as well as receptions for distinguished visitors such as Lillian Fenn, Beatrice Irwin and Bertha Case Rihani; her regular guests included Paul Mays, William Watts and F. Carl Smith with their wives.21 On one occasion in July of 1921 she staged a display of fifty coastal subjects by Jennie Cannon who reciprocated by inviting Balfour to exhibit at her Berkeley studio-gallery.22 Due to Roberta’s widely published views on disarmament she was appointed a delegate to the 1925 World Peace Conference at the ANNA ROBERTA BALFOUR (Brown, Abloescher, Palace Hotel in San Francisco.23 In July of 1926 she hosted an exhibition Thudichum, Lazier) (1872-1940 / Plate 1b) was born Anna Roberta of works by Mitsumaru Kobayana, the noted Japanese artist and director of 316 the Kyoto Art Institute.24 At that time in Balfour’s house Carmel’s mayor In 1924 at the Eighteenth Annual of the Arts and Crafts Club she exhibited was given twelve wood block prints, an official gift from the government of a popular piece called Incense and a second work entitled Progress. Japan. She held another home-display of Japanese art in September.25 Incense was said to “show new moods and new concepts of the eternal By the mid 1920s she had become one of Carmel’s most beauty” and was later exhibited at the Sendai Store in Monterey.30 popular and unusual portrait artists. Henry David Gray, a Stanford For the 1923 exhibit of the Painters and Sculptors of Southern Professor and Carmel regular, sat for a studio portrait and as Balfour California Antony Anderson reviewed her work in the Los Angeles Times:31 painted he penned this remarkable study of the artist:26 Roberta Balfour Thudichum, who lives and paints in . I can supply a certain amount of information about Carmel, shows us a remarkably beautiful bit of color - the color of an artistic method which I believe to be unique and of genuine broken jewels - and haunting suggestiveness in “The Heart of the importance. Burnt Cypress,” a famous landmark at Point Lobos, but never till now Mrs. Roberta Balfour Thudichum has been painting for painted. Mrs. Thudichum uses the palette knife exclusively, and she only about five years. For her early work I do not care in the least. It certainly gives us much vital beauty with this difficult painting tool. was without technique, and it did not expose at all what she intended. That October she exhibited twenty of her palette knife paintings at the For her theories, as I knew them from a slight personal acquaintance Cyrus Bontwell Gallery in Denver and was the first guest-artist invited to with her, I had little sympathy or patience. But within the last year a occupy the “studio” at Chappell House, on the site of the Denver few of her pictures, and particularly the portraits, developed a vitality Museum.32 This display was later sent to the Babcock Galleries in New that indicated a clear strain of genius. Figures in a dim light stood out York City. In November of 1924, when she exhibited for the first time in an from the canvas in a most amazing way. I found myself turning back, Annual at the Oakland Art Gallery, Florence W. Lehre noted in her time after time, to look again at these paintings, for they refused to evaluation for The Oakland Tribune that Balfour’s “work is a vivid mosaic of reveal all they had to tell. It seemed that this artist had some secret color - a mixture of impressionism and ultra-modernism.”33 Her pieces in which the average painter did not know. Oakland included a “brilliant mural done in pure colors of gladioli from the But the startling thing, the thing that separates the work of Kirschoff Gardens near Del Monte, and two views at Point Lobos and in Roberta Balfour from that of her merely excellent contemporaries, is Carmel Valley.”34 At the simultaneous Annual of the Berkeley League of that she paints the past behind the present, or rather, she paints her Fine Arts the San Francisco Chronicle praised her mural and study of subject’s remote ancestry before she “brings him down” - as she puts Pebble Beach.35 Florence Lehre summarized her displayed work in it - to the present age.